The Broken God Machine

by Christopher Buecheler

  * * *

  The tree was old – twisted and gnarled, thick-trunked and thick-limbed. It had sat on its hill, casting its shadow upon the rippling grass of the plains, for more than six centuries, and in that time countless rabbits had built their warrens under its massive cluster of roots. Pehr had filled some of the older, disused holes with provisions, and when he and Tasha arrived at last to collect them, they found that only a few had been disturbed by the grassland creatures. Pehr had expected this and stocked extra provisions for safety, and so they found themselves with all the food and water that they could carry.

  Beyond these supplies, Tasha and Pehr carried few other items. Pehr had his club and knife, his bow, and a single quiver of twenty arrows. Tasha carried the two tral pelts on which they would sleep and a bone knife of her own. Her only other possession was her walking stick.

  They set out on their journey just three hours after dusk and walked steadily through the night. At dawn they stopped briefly and had a quick breakfast of cold tral meat, then resumed their march. They were not pushing themselves to excess, but Pehr knew that by the end of the day he and Tasha would be exhausted. They pressed on regardless, wanting to put distance between themselves and Samhad just in case the elder hunter had decided to follow them after all. They walked in near silence, content to focus on the journey and the physical effort of walking so many miles.

  To pass the time, Pehr went over what he knew about the Lagos and their metal god, forcing himself to revisit the gruesome details of Jace’s death and the deaths of the children who had gone before him. Pehr couldn't think of any reason why the metal thing hadn't taken him in the very same way that it had taken every other creature that set foot within its deadly perimeter, save that it had clearly seem something in him that it had found lacking in the others. Had his running at the guardian caused this? Was there some other reason? What had he done?

  After some time, Pehr realized he was simply twisting the same images around in his head, over and over, and gleaning nothing new from them. He decided that the most simple case was also the most likely: in all probability, whatever had saved him had been nothing of his own doing. Whether by the grace of the Gods or by simple, stupid luck, it had decided to spare Pehr the fate it had doled out to all the others.

  Dusk fell, and Pehr could hear Tasha yawning behind him as they walked. He was impressed with her stoicism; she hadn't complained or questioned when they would stop, nor had she asked how far he thought they had come and how much was left to go. Pehr supposed whatever sense of urgency it was that was driving her prevented her from expressing any desire to stop for the night. He suspected that he could walk along in front of her until she collapsed and Tasha would not voice a single word of complaint. She wanted to be where they were headed, and with plenty of time to determine what she needed to do there before they reached the critical point in time that she was convinced was coming.

  Pehr was right; two hours after sunset, it was he who called the march to a halt. Tasha only looked at him with some bizarre combination of gratitude and frustration.

  “I hoped we would get further,” she said, and Pehr guessed that she would have said the same even if they had spent the last eighteen hours at a dead sprint. He said nothing, only shrugged and began clearing out a spot for the fire. The plains were very dry in the summer, and he knew that any flame carried danger, but the air could grow cold at night even now. Pehr wanted the warmth and the chance to roast some of the unsalted meat he’d brought.

  While he dug the hole, clearing a large swath of the surrounding area of any grasses, Tasha wordlessly visited nearby jesuva trees and collected wood. The branches would provide the base for the fire, while layers of green grass would serve a dual purpose, creating smoke to keep insects away and preventing the fire from flaring up and consuming its fuel too quickly.

  “How do you feel?” Pehr asked her when the fire was kindled. They were roasting the chunks of meat on skewers, and each also had a piece of the hard, dense black bread that Tasha’s kin favored.

  “I’m fine,” Tasha said, nibbling at her bread and looking at the roasting meat with an expression close to greed.

  “You look exhausted,” Pehr told her.

  “So do you!” she shot back, and Pehr held his hands up in a gesture of peace.

  “That wasn’t an accusation,” he said, and he smiled. “It was only a comment.”

  Tasha’s angry expression faded. “Sorry, Pehr … I’m sorry. I thought you were playing the big, strong hunter who never needs to sleep.”

  “I’m looking forward to sleeping. I’ve been thinking about it for hours.”

  “Yes. I’m very tired. I’m sorry for snapping at you.”

  “No harm was done,” Pehr said, and neither spoke again until after they had finished eating, when they were lying atop their tral hides and staring up at the sky.

  Pehr could feel himself drifting off when Tasha asked, “Are you frightened?”

  Pehr yawned, and asked, “Of what?”

  “Of going back.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think we’ll find?”

  “At the end of the path that I didn’t take? Tasha, I truly cannot guess. Mountains, probably … stones, snow … maybe more things made of metal. More guardians.”

  “I think there must be something more than that.”

  Pehr considered this, and after a moment he nodded. “The guardians wouldn’t be there to watch over stones and snow.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Whatever we find, Tasha, I wouldn’t expect it to be miraculous … at least not in any good way.” The metal thing was miraculous, of course, but Pehr would have had difficulty finding anything good about it beyond the fact that it had spared his life for no apparent reason.

  “Whatever we find will be old and mostly dead,” Tasha agreed, and Pehr could tell from the sound of her voice that she was near sleep.

  “You’ve seen it in the dreams?”

  “I … I think so.”

  “So you know what to expect?”

  “No. It’s not like that. I don’t understand everything in the dreams. Much is hidden, and much more is in plain sight but impossible to understand.”

  Pehr thought about his own dreams, where so much was clear and yet there were still such gaping holes of comprehension. He told Tasha that he understood what she meant, and the girl made a murmur of acceptance. After that, there was only the buzzing of crickets and the rush of the wind through the grass. Tasha was asleep.

  Pehr thought of Samhad and wondered how far the hunter had come before understanding that his daughter and his surrogate son didn’t mean to be caught. Did he think they’d eloped? No, surely not … the man himself had intimated that he would give a union between the two his blessing at the first sign that they wished it. Surely he understood what this was, that his daughter had finally done the thing she’d been preparing to do all her life. Surely he knew that she’d gone to the mountains, where her people were forbidden to go.

  Those who went to the mountains did not come back. Tasha had told him that, and Pehr wondered whether they would prove any different than all the others. He was still pondering this question when sleep took him.

  Chapter 17

  When they came at last to the band of trees that separated the plains from the near-impenetrable cliffs of the mountain range, Tasha lost herself to emotion for the first time since Pehr had met her.

  The suddenness and force by which she was overcome took him by surprise; one moment they were walking underneath the trees and the next they’d passed through the edge and were met with the sight of the mountains rising before them, and Tasha was doubled over, sobbing. Pehr stopped, turned, and covered the ten yards between them in a few running strides, placing his hand on her shoulder.

  “What is it?” he asked, but after a second more he realized he understood. When Tasha was able to speak, she confirmed it.

  “I have spent my whole life waiting for t
his moment,” she croaked in between harsh gasps for air.

  Pehr had never seen someone weep like this. The tears poured from her eyes in a torrent, her cheeks stained an angry red, her legs barely able to support her. He guided Tasha down to her knees and sat beside her. She put her hands over her face, trying to gain control but not yet able to do so.

  “There’s no shame in being afraid,” Pehr said, and Tasha shook her head.

  “I am not afraid,” she said through her fingers. “Oh, Pehr, I’m not afraid, it’s just … the mountains have called to me since I was little more than a baby, and now I am here at last.”

  Pehr understood how she felt, in a way; he had spent the first sixteen years of his life studying for, training for, and dreaming of the hunter’s Test. He still felt that he’d been cheated, that it’d been stolen from him by the Lagos’s untimely interruption, and because of that he could not rightly be called a man, even now.

  “I worry that whatever we find, it will not live up to your expectations,” he said after a time. Tasha’s sobs had become sniffles, and she had uncovered her face, but she would not raise her eyes to meet his.

  “I do not think either of us could possibly know what to expect,” she said.

  Pehr took her hand and squeezed it. When she at last raised her eyes to meet his, he smiled. “It will probably be terrible. Shall we go and see?”

  The corners of Tasha’s mouth twitched in what Pehr thought was as close as she could come to a smile for the moment. She nodded, and he helped her return to her feet.

  “There’s a stream to the south,” he said. “We should refill the skins before we go. It shouldn’t take long … we’ve still got plenty of food, so we don’t need to worry about hunting.”

  Tasha looked at him for a long time. Then she nodded and said, “You are a good man, Khada’Pehr.”

  Pehr sighed and shook his head. “Someone … someone else that I cared about told me that once. I told her that I was not a man, and I tell you the same.”

  “Nani.”

  “Yes.”

  Tasha shook her head. “You were wrong. I think you were wrong even then, and I’ve no doubt you are wrong now. You are a man, Pehr, and a good one. She saw it in you, and I do, too.”

  Pehr shrugged, embarrassed by this praise. “I want to go home, Tasha. I want to see my cousin again and help return our village to prosperity. I never should have left. Now? I'm only doing what I must.”

  Tasha shook her head and turned south, toward the stream, not looking back at him. “Much more than that.”

  When they came to the stream, they drank from the cold, clear water and filled their skins. Tasha took the opportunity to wash her face, cleansing herself of the tears that had dried, sticky, on her cheeks. Looking more like the cool, composed girl he had always known, she said she was ready, and they made their way back to the path into the mountains.

  “I think the climb will take an hour or more,” Pehr told her. “It’s not a difficult slope, but it is long and winding, and there are points where piles of rock sit unstable on the ground. I lost my footing twice on the way down.”

  “I will be careful,” Tasha said.

  “I would have you walk ahead of me, just the same, at least until we reach the intersection. If you fall, there’s a chance I can keep you from suffering any major injury.”

  Tasha looked vaguely annoyed but didn’t argue. Instead she asked, “Will we go to see your guardian?”

  Pehr bit his lip and shook his head. There would be a time to contemplate that course of action, but he was not yet ready. “Whatever it is you’re looking for, it lies along the other path, not in the circle of bone.”

  He gestured for her to go on, and Tasha nodded, making her way into the split between the jagged rock walls. She proved nimble footed on the slow climb up the path, slipping only once and catching herself before Pehr had any need to intervene. The going grew steadily easier as they went, with fewer stones and pebbles littering the ground, and the path began to level out somewhere near an hour into the journey.

  At last they reached the split in the path. To the right, it wound away further into the mountains where Pehr had never been. To the left, around the curve, lay the metal thing’s domain. Tasha stopped at this point, staring up the path that lead further into the mountains as if, by doing so, she could see through solid stone to what lay at its end. Pehr found that he could barely look at the branch that led to the circle of bone, knowing the thing that had killed Jace and so many others stood less than twenty yards from where they were now.

  “Some part of me hoped never to return here,” he said.

  Tasha turned to look at him and then glanced down the path that led to the circle of bone. “Bad memories,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “You did all for him that you could.”

  Pehr couldn’t meet her gaze. “I will lead from here. The ground is solid, and—”

  “And I am a woman, and must be protected,” Tasha finished for him, a hint of both humor and distaste in her voice.

  Pehr knew she was at least half joking, but he found himself unable to contain a sudden swell of anger at her words. This girl had never been here before and didn’t know or understand the power and danger of just a single guardian. If there were more ahead, Pehr had no doubt that they would be up to the task of killing Tasha. Should they react to his presence as the one in the circle of bones had, it might well save her life, and he appreciated that fact even if she did not. He glared at the girl, brow furrowed.

  “I would seek to protect you even were you a man twice my age, a killer of hundreds of men and thousands of tral. I have seen what’s here in real life, not in dreams, and if I can keep the things which guard this place from killing you, I would do so.”

  “Oh, Pehr, don’t …” Tasha seemed embarrassed and unsure how to respond to this. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I am merely nervous.”

  This was something Pehr could understand, and he felt his anger ebbing away, a sense of foolishness taking its place. After all this time, to become irritated by something so simple seemed suddenly ridiculous to him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m nervous, too. This journey seems as if it’s tightened up every muscle and sinew inside of me. It’s the same for both of us, I think.”

  “It is, but I want you to understand … I do not fear death here. You shouldn’t worry about me, Pehr.”

  Pehr couldn't have taken this advice even if he’d wanted to, and so he merely shrugged and said, “Let’s see what there is at the end of this path.”

  They made their way through the canyon with relative ease. The ground was only a very gradual slope, largely free from debris. This far up, the mountains were made mostly of some hard, grey rock that was flecked with white spots and seemed to wear away instead of chipping or crumbling. There was no vegetation to be seen other than a few small mosses and the lichen that clung to the stone. Deep gullies had been carved into the places where the path met the stone, worn there by water running its course over countless centuries.

  Pehr had just convinced himself that the metal thing below was the only guardian to be found when he rounded a corner and stopped short, confronted by something that at first he mistook for a man. Rapidly he understood that this was not a person but rather some version of the thing that guarded the circle of bone, much better preserved but still in a state of hideous decay.

  The thing’s skin – if it could be called that – was sagging in places, torn in others, and coated in slimy green mold. If once it had worn clothing, the fabric had long since rotted away. Pehr saw that it was man-shaped, but without nipples or sex organs. In the center of its chest was a large, black circle, perhaps a cap of some sort. Its eyelids, nose and lips had been eaten away, giving it the grotesque, grinning visage of a half-rotted corpse. Where the eyelids should have been there were plates of metal covering the thing’s deadly eyes.

  Pehr cried out for Tasha to stop and stay behind cover
, knowing even as he did so that the warning would come too late. Tasha’s strides had taken her into the thing’s line of vision and, just as the first guardian had done, this version jerked to life. It cried something in a language that Pehr did not know, throwing its arms wide, and Pehr had to fight back a moment of violent nausea as the substance clinging to those limbs sloughed off and fell to the ground with a wet plopping noise. There were no muscles exposed by the thing’s sudden loss of skin, only a series of tan sacks bulging with greenish fluid and an uncountable number of whirring discs and plunging cylinders.

  Pehr spun, hoping to shove Tasha back behind the outcropping of rock, only to realize that, like its brother down below, this guardian had paused. It cocked its head to one side, clearly studying Pehr despite its covered eyes, and after a moment it spoke again. This time there could be no doubt of its words, for once again Pehr found himself being addressed in something very close to his own language.

  “DNA match confirmed. Welcome to Havenmont, Prime Minister Mombutabwe! Is this your guest?”

  Pehr glanced toward Tasha, who was staring at the guardian with wide eyes. She nodded emphatically, and Pehr turned back to the metal thing. “Yes, she is my guest.”

  “Excellent! I am called Ardis. I am tasked with dispensing information and upholding security. In these trying times, we must be careful not to let enemies cross our borders. May I ask you your name, ma’am?”

  After a moment, Tasha said, “I … I am called Tasha, daughter of Samhad.”

  “Welcome to Havenmont, Tasha Samhad. I cannot place your accent. Do you come from the New Phoenix bunker?”

  “I … no, I’m sorry,” Tasha said.

  “A pilgrim, then? Please enter and be well!”

  “This is a guardian?” Tasha asked Pehr, but the thing answered her before he could.

  “I am tasked with dispensing information and upholding security. In these trying times—”

  “How do you know me?” Pehr interrupted, and the thing turned its attention back to him.

  “Prime Minister, your DNA and that of Professor Montgomery is hard-wired into all Mark Fours as a full-clearance security match.”